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Civic honesty around the globe

(science.sciencemag.org)
209 points ojosilva | 4 comments | 20 Jun 19 19:31 UTC | HN request time: 1.048s | source
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oska ◴[20 Jun 19 20:36 UTC] No.20237085[source]▶
A bit odd that they didn't include Japan in their set of countries. My expectation is that it would have probably topped the list.
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davetannenbaum ◴[20 Jun 19 20:47 UTC] No.20237185[source]▶
We originally planned to include Japan but after some initial pilot testing we realized that the country was unsuitable for methodological reasons. Japan has a lot of small “police booths” where people can return lost objects. During our pilot tests, we found that Japanese citizens would not contact the owner but instead drop them off at a nearby police booth. This feature made it virtually impossible for us to assign individual wallets to particular drop-off locations.
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scythe ◴[20 Jun 19 20:52 UTC] No.20237247[source]▶
>Japan has a lot of small “police booths” where people can return lost objects.

I like this idea.

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mandelbrotwurst ◴[21 Jun 19 00:00 UTC] No.20238678[source]▶
Arguably not a good idea in the United States, where many people are justifiably reluctant to go anywhere near the police.
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1. scythe ◴[21 Jun 19 02:04 UTC] No.20239254[source]▶
I was imagining the United States. I thought people would be more willing to approach a booth, which includes a physical barrier. While many people are afraid of the police, they nonetheless serve a necessary function, and many people are dissatisfied with the effectiveness of the police in their communities.
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2. mjevans ◴[21 Jun 19 05:14 UTC] No.20240040[source]▶
It's more that the police are nearly always there to enforce punitive things rather than improve an actual public good.

Instead of designing things properly (large scale zoning, zoning laws that make sense, building codes to improve the quality of life) we make poor decisions based on cheep and fast; externalize the costs; then make living with those costs a fear/punishment based enforcement.

If "peace officers" were out doing only commonly agreed good things, improving lives rather than being 'tough on crime' then they'd be part of a solution rather than a problem.

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3. _delirium ◴[21 Jun 19 05:22 UTC] No.20240074[source]▶
It's not really a proper solution, but libraries serve as a kind of alternative "official authority" for things like that in the part of the US where I currently live (one of their many unofficial jobs that aren't properly accounted for or funded). People seem to drop off stuff in the library even if they didn't find it there, because it's a place you can easily enter, and librarians are perceived as having some kind of official status (being government employees), but compared to others are seen as approachable and pretty honest and benign. So people assume the librarian will probably know what to do with the wallet and probably won't just pocket the cash. And, many people are less apprehensive about walking up to a library front desk compared to walking into a police station.
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4. interfixus ◴[21 Jun 19 05:53 UTC] No.20240193{3}[source]▶
Well then, welcome to my world. Where I live - provincial Denmark - these days our local police resides behind a desk ... at the library. Mind you, this is police of a variety radically different from just about any aspect of American police I've ever seen described. Our police structure and organisation is in shambles, but at the personal level, a police officer is first and foremost a service provider, and the ones I've interacted with over the years have been unfailingly professionel, non-threatening, and polite. Also: Fit and never, ever overweight.